Our Culture

Our values are the core of our culture, offering a set of guidelines on the
behaviors and mindsets needed to achieve our mission.

Deliver joyful client experiences.

Client service isn't simply about complying with a contract. It's about delivering joy. We do this by designing engaging experiences, constructing meaningful and memorable interactions, facilitating the discovery of new and profound insights, imparting mastery of new competencies, delivering transparent value toward the realization of important goals, and doing the little things well.

Remember whom we serve.

We serve the people who've dedicated their lives to serving the public and creating better outcomes for citizens. Their missions are hard, complex, and admirable. They deserve our humility, empathy, objectivity, dedication, and reliable effort.

Hire and empower great people.

We believe in the power of first-rate colleagues. Therefore, hiring is the most important thing we do. We look for passion, emotional intelligence, attitude, character, growth potential, and skill. Then, we let great people do great things for our clients.

Develop our people into stars.

We believe a culture of development not only promotes star formation, but also contributes to the overall strength of the organization. Development activities (for example, coaching and peer mentoring) are woven into the normal, day-to-day operations.

Design an engaging employee experience.

Employees are people, too. We apply design thinking to the employee experience to make worklife simple, flexible, enjoyable, and productive.

Reward results, not activity.

Merit — not politics — is favored above all else. We employ a performance system that is fair, clear, and objective to measure results.

Collaborate for the win.

The best ideas and solutions don't emerge from a one-person band, but rather from diverse teams of specialists who share knowledge, workload and sense of purpose, communicate openly, and trust each other. We actively foster the right conditions for collaboration to emerge, sparking insight and innovation.

Give credit where it's due.

Collaboration and innovation flourish in environments that fully recognize people's unique ideas and contributions. We go out of our way to acknowledge the original source, not just the most recent or loudest contributor.

Change for the better — every day.

Big results come from small changes accumulated over time. We foster a culture where everyone proactively works together to achieve regular, incremental improvements to the organization.

Pursue modern ways of working.

New trends and technologies are constantly on the horizon. We embrace — even pioneer — new developments, go deep to understand their viability and impact, and harness those with the greatest promise to the benefit of our clients and employees.

Uphold a simple, unbureaucratic business model.

Bureaucracy makes organizations inertial, incremental, uninspiring, and wasteful. It gets in the way of delivering great experiences and superior value to clients. We uphold an organization — both architecturally and ideologically — that makes it as fully capable as the people who work within it.

Exercise pragmatic transparency.

Transparency is about clarity around the things that are important, not all things. We believe a system of transparency — that strikes the right balance with the need for individual and team privacy — reveals truth, builds trust, promotes collaboration, encourages authentic behavior, roots-out wasteful practices, and drives high levels of performance.

Excel ethically.

Ethics reduced to "check-the-box" compliance programs, and statements of negative choices to avoid, often create the illusion of reducing risk and can even stunt innovation. We focus on positive organizational and classical virtues, reinforcing how people should exhibit these through social processes.

Give back.

Giving back strengthens our communities, brings people together, provides us valuable experience, and makes us more engaged in our work. Giving back takes many forms from volunteering to sharing our collective knowledge (for example, via blog posts and open-source contributions). As a HUBZone, it's also about creating greater economic opportunities for the Chapel Hill, North Carolina community and beyond.

Become a culture carrier.

Join our team of talented technologists working together to cultivate an incredible culture.